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Lot Essay
In 1885 Sisley lived in Les Sablons, a small village not far from the town of Moret-sur-Loing, where he would settle permanently in 1889. The artist was enamoured of the area and frequently portrayed the foot paths through woods and thickets, and country lanes which surrounded his home. Nevertheless, however absorbed he was by the natural landscape, he rarely overlooked the presence of people casually going about their daily lives. “In many of the paintings made at Les Sablons, the note is one of withdrawn simplicity, meditative and undramatic. This is country life, neither bucolic nor picturesque...in which the only ‘events’ are a turn in the road or a fallen tree, a local woman on a path...” (R. Shone, Sisley, London, 1992, p. 142)
In contrast to an artist like Monet, for whom the pure and untrammelled state of nature held far greater mystery and attraction, Sisley endeavoured to depict an easy and untroubled balance between rural life and nature. Gustave Geffroy wrote: “He sought to express the harmonies that prevail, in all weather and at every time of day, between foliage, water and sky; and he succeeded... He loved river banks; the fringes of woodlands; towns and villages glimpsed through the trees; old buildings swamped in greenery; winter morning sunlight; summer afternoons. He had a delicate way of conveying the effects of foliage (in "Sisley," Les Cahiers d'Aujourd'hui, Paris, 1923).
The sense of abundant and verdant nature is wholly evident in Vue de village. Magnificently lush trees extend upwards and expand with the weight of their thick, full, new leaves whilst the long green grass conveys a lively untamed texture, its vast expanse warmed with falling light in the sun. Contrasts enliven the composition with the deep green shadows providing shady respite, the mahogany-coloured wood of the trees and receding line of the fence structuring the composition and ordering the altogether lush, rich greenery, a moment in nature captured fully and beautifully. The figures of a mother and child to the right, a group of hens to the centre, are delicately and finely articulated, diminutive within the great sense of openness and airiness of nature around them. Nature takes over in this composition as the line of tiny houses diminishing along the horizon line serve to subtly separate the lively fields from the open and magnificent sky, itself expressed in myriad shades of blue, carefully dappled with the puffy white clouds of a warm summer’s day. The fresh air is almost tangible, palpable and accessible to the viewer.
The wonderfully structured and deftly painted composition of Vue de village reiterates Sisley's individual approach to painterly surfaces and, in particular, his belief in the prominence of light, which functions for him as both a formal element and a fantastic phenomenon: "Objects should be rendered with their own textures and above all they should be bathed in light as they are in nature. This is what we should be striving to achieve. The sky is not simply a background: its planes give depth (for the sky has planes as well as solid ground), and the shapes of clouds give movement to a picture. What is more beautiful indeed than a summer sky with its wispy clouds idly floating across the blue? What movement and grace . . . They are like the waves at sea, one is uplifted and carried away" (V. Coudrey, Alfred Sisley: The English Impressionist, Exeter, 1992, p. 68).
In contrast to an artist like Monet, for whom the pure and untrammelled state of nature held far greater mystery and attraction, Sisley endeavoured to depict an easy and untroubled balance between rural life and nature. Gustave Geffroy wrote: “He sought to express the harmonies that prevail, in all weather and at every time of day, between foliage, water and sky; and he succeeded... He loved river banks; the fringes of woodlands; towns and villages glimpsed through the trees; old buildings swamped in greenery; winter morning sunlight; summer afternoons. He had a delicate way of conveying the effects of foliage (in "Sisley," Les Cahiers d'Aujourd'hui, Paris, 1923).
The sense of abundant and verdant nature is wholly evident in Vue de village. Magnificently lush trees extend upwards and expand with the weight of their thick, full, new leaves whilst the long green grass conveys a lively untamed texture, its vast expanse warmed with falling light in the sun. Contrasts enliven the composition with the deep green shadows providing shady respite, the mahogany-coloured wood of the trees and receding line of the fence structuring the composition and ordering the altogether lush, rich greenery, a moment in nature captured fully and beautifully. The figures of a mother and child to the right, a group of hens to the centre, are delicately and finely articulated, diminutive within the great sense of openness and airiness of nature around them. Nature takes over in this composition as the line of tiny houses diminishing along the horizon line serve to subtly separate the lively fields from the open and magnificent sky, itself expressed in myriad shades of blue, carefully dappled with the puffy white clouds of a warm summer’s day. The fresh air is almost tangible, palpable and accessible to the viewer.
The wonderfully structured and deftly painted composition of Vue de village reiterates Sisley's individual approach to painterly surfaces and, in particular, his belief in the prominence of light, which functions for him as both a formal element and a fantastic phenomenon: "Objects should be rendered with their own textures and above all they should be bathed in light as they are in nature. This is what we should be striving to achieve. The sky is not simply a background: its planes give depth (for the sky has planes as well as solid ground), and the shapes of clouds give movement to a picture. What is more beautiful indeed than a summer sky with its wispy clouds idly floating across the blue? What movement and grace . . . They are like the waves at sea, one is uplifted and carried away" (V. Coudrey, Alfred Sisley: The English Impressionist, Exeter, 1992, p. 68).